The longlist of 16 books was chosen from 121 eligible entries and are as follows (in alphabetical order);

The Bottle and the Genie, Mohammad Abu Maatouk

The Tobacco Guard, Ali Badr

Hunger, Mohammad Al Bsati,

The Unfaithful Translator, Fawaz Haddad

The Man From Andalucia, Salem Hameesh

Prayer For The Family, Renée Hayek

Confessions, Rabih Jaber

Platoon Of Ruin, Abdel Kareem Jouaitly,

The American Granddaughter, Inaam Kachachi

The Tumour, Ibrahim Al Koni,

Black Taste, Black Odour, Ali Al Muqri

Time Of White Horses, Ibrahim Nasrallah

The Scents Of Marie-Claire, Al Habib Salmi

Intensive Care, Izzedin Shukri

Ma’ Al Sama’, Yehya Yekhlef

Beelzebub, Yussef Zeydan

The longlist has been selected by a panel of five judges from Europe and the Arab World. As is customary with the prize, the 2009 judges will be announced at the same time as the shortlist, on 10 December 2008.

They’ll announce the winner on March 6th, 2009, the eve of the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair.

The biggest issues with books like The Subsidiary often have to do with their underpinnings—when we learn that Georges Perec wrote La Disparition without once using the letter E, we are impressed. Imagine such a task! It takes a high. . .

Death by Water, Kenzaburo Oe’s latest novel to be translated into English, practically begs you to read it as autobiography. Like The Changeling, as well as many other works not yet released in English, Death by Water is narrated in. . .

Jocelyne Saucier’s Twenty-One Cardinals is about the type of unique, indestructible, and often tragic loyalty only found in families. For a brief but stunningly mesmerizing 169 pages, Twenty-One Cardinals invited me in to the haunting and intimate world of the. . .

We know so very little; so little that what we think to be knowledge is hardly worth reckoning with at all; instead we ought to settle for being pleasantly surprised if, on the edge of things, against all expectations, our. . .

Many of Virginie Despentes’s books revolve around the same central idea: “To be born a woman [is] the worst fate in practically every society.” But this message is nearly always packaged in easy-to-read books that fill you with the pleasure. . .

Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer’s La Superba is appropriately titled after the Italian city of Genoa, where, after escaping the pressures of fame in his own country, the semi-autobiographical narrator finds himself cataloguing the experiences of its mesmerizing inhabitants with the intention. . .

It took reading 44 pages of Intervenir/Intervene before I began to get a sense of what Dolores Dorantes and Rodrigo Flores Sánchez were up to. Recurring throughout these 44 pages—throughout the entire book—are shovels, shovel smacks to the face, lobelias—aha!. . .

As presaged by its title, contradiction is the theme of Peter Stamm’s novel, All Days Are Night. Gillian, a well-known television personality, remains unknowable to herself. And Hubert, a frustrated artist and Gillian’s lover, creates art through the process of. . .

It’s a rare and wonderful book that begins and ends with violence and humor. At the start of Etgar Keret’s The Seven Good Years, Keret is in a hospital waiting for the birth of his first child while nurses, in. . .